Source: Workers Daily
Tesla was investigated again
Tesla has been investigated by U.S. auto safety regulators.
On August 16, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said that because Tesla vehicles had previously had a series of crashes, it needed to investigate its automatic assisted driving system. Previously, the agency and the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board had launched a number of investigations into Tesla-related traffic accidents.
Although under normal circumstances, there are not many opportunities for individual driving vehicles to "intersect" with vehicles involved in emergency rescue, since the beginning of 2018, Tesla Motors has encountered 11 accidents at the emergency rescue site, resulting in a total of 1 death and 17 injuries.
The emergency rescue scene usually takes corresponding warning measures, such as flashing police lights of the police car, lighting sticks and lighting signs, traffic cones, etc., but tesla vehicles in the state of automatic assisted driving, still collided with the emergency rescue vehicle or other vehicles on the scene. When the collision occurred, the Tesla car that caused the accident seemed to "see" the obstacle in front of it, and it was indifferent to the warning signs.
According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, four of the crashes under investigation occurred this year, and most of them occurred after dark, most typically in Michigan in March. At that time, a police car was parked on the highway to deal with a car accident, and a Tesla Model Y crashed directly into the police car.
The most recent one occurred on July 10 in San Diego, California.
Since these Tesla vehicles were in auto-assisted driving mode or traffic-aware cruise control mode at the time of the accident, the survey will evaluate the technologies and methods used in auto-assisted driving operations, as well as the monitoring and response of vehicles in auto-assisted driving mode to the surrounding environment.
The vehicles surveyed cover all models produced by Tesla between 2014 and 2021, totaling about 765,000 vehicles.
Some industry experts believe that under the current technical conditions, cameras and radar are the most important means for Tesla cars to achieve automatic auxiliary driving functions, but both are difficult to identify parked traffic police cars or road cones and other equipment. Radar may have difficulty distinguishing stationary objects, and cameras will only help vehicles identify obstacles if the system is trained to recognize specific scenes.
An expert at Tesla also said: "Radar sometimes fails randomly, the measurement function is not normal, and you don't know when this failure will occur." ”
In recent years, driver assistance systems, which are new to the automotive industry, have not been strictly regulated in the United States. Although Tesla sometimes emphasizes that this system is "automatic assisted driving" rather than "automatic driving", and the driver cannot release the steering wheel when opening the system, many users who are too eager for automatic driving still regard it as a complete automatic driving function. On some video websites, videos of Tesla's automatic driving tests are often visible.
On May 10, the California police arrested a driver on suspicion of dangerous driving, and the driver posted a video on a video website that sat in the back seat and controlled the Tesla Model 3, and some police sources said they had witnessed the operation on the highway.
In the face of constant accidents, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has tightened its regulation of assisted driving or autopilot functions that cause accidents. At the end of June, the agency issued a new decree requiring car companies to report serious accidents involving assisted driving and autonomous driving systems within a day. Automakers and operators must also publish monthly vehicle safety reports with more detailed content.
For automotive companies, achieving true driverless driving is the ultimate direction for the development of this technology. Although Tesla Motors has repeatedly said that the features it provides make driving safer, its CEO Musk also declared on social media that "the probability of accidents in Tesla cars equipped with self-driving assistance systems is nearly 10 times lower than that of ordinary cars." But in reality, to this day, people have not created absolutely safe car driverless systems.
On the one hand, the technology itself needs to be continuously improved, which is a long process; on the other hand, some drivers are too superstitious, attached to and even ostentatious about the transition technology, which also exacerbates the occurrence of accidents.
Dong Pei